Hello and welcome to Documensch Research, your one-stop-shop for what’s new in Jewish research.
April was a big month. Our roundup of community research includes back-to-back polls on the Iran war, a new look at platform-driven antisemitism among young Americans, and some smart new assessments of Jewish education. On the academic side, there’s new analysis of campus antisemitism, a look at the computational turn in Holocaust studies, and a database of hundreds of long-buried Soviet Yiddish periodicals. Strap in and hold on — there is a LOT going on.
Check us on the Documensch Daily website or on Bluesky to get the latest. As always, reach out with feedback, suggestions of people we should interview, or ideas for research we should consider sharing and archiving. We can be reached at bermanarchive@stanford.edu.
Without further ado,
-Ari
Ari Y Kelman, Director, Berman Archive at Stanford
Community Research
Loose War Footing: Two surveys released the same week found a majority of American Jews opposed the war with Iran. A Jewish Electorate Institute/Mellman Group poll found 55% disapprove of U.S. military action, with 73% believing Trump should have sought Congressional approval first; a J Street/GBAO poll put opposition at 60%. Support is concentrated among Republican and Orthodox Jews. Both surveys show continued erosion of Israel-aligned sentiment among younger, non-Orthodox Americans.
Losing Israel: A Pew Research Center poll of 3,500 U.S. adults finds 60% now view Israel unfavorably, up 20 points since 2022. 56% of Jewish Americans expressed little or no confidence in Netanyahu. Declines are sharpest among young adults and Democrats.
The Feed Problem: The Spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll, surveying over 3,400 registered voters, finds that young Americans who get their news from social media are 1.5 to 2 times more likely to agree with antisemitic statements than peers who use traditional news sources.
Platform Failure: A new ADL report, produced with JLens ahead of Meta’s annual shareholder meeting, finds that Instagram removed just 7% of hateful and extremist content flagged by researchers between January and February 2026. The report documents white supremacist networks, accounts linked to designated terrorist organizations, and Nazi merchandise vendors with millions of combined followers.
Deadliest Year: Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute released their annual global antisemitism report on Yom HaShoah, finding that 2025 was the deadliest year for Jews worldwide since the 1994 AMIA bombing. The report warns that elevated antisemitism risks becoming a normalized reality.
Pay School: The Samis Foundation has published the first ever structural comparison of Jewish and Catholic day school economics, finding the tuition gap is structural: dual curriculum doubles teaching staff requirements, security costs have surged 124% since 2022, and Jewish schools lack the layered parish subsidies that suppress Catholic tuition. The report maps two existing models, in Seattle and Chicago, that are demonstrably closing the gap.
Better Together: A new Jim Joseph Foundation case study finds that a shared Jewish communal campus in Newton, MA is saving money and sparking new ideas, like a weekly community lunch co-op that has become a campus institution. Read more at eJewish Philanthropy.
Commitment vs. Satisfaction: The Jim Joseph Foundation’s Growing Educators and Leaders Study has published its Year 2 interim report, with findings summarized in eJP by Alex Pomson of Rosov Consulting. Following 550+ Jewish educators longitudinally, the study finds that career commitment is remarkably stable, but job satisfaction swings almost entirely on one variable: the quality of supervision. 41% of participants experienced a meaningful change in their supervisory relationship in a single year, making it the most volatile dimension measured.
Academic Research
Campus Prejudice: A new report from Brandeis’ Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies finds antisemitism on campus is not one problem but three: hostile views toward Israel concentrated among the extremely liberal; hostility toward Jews specifically more common among non-white and Muslim students; and generalized minority-group hostility more common on the right. Nearly half of Jewish students reported experiencing some form of prejudice in fall 2025.
Listening at Scale: A new open-access article in Holocaust and Genocide Studies by Renana Keydar, Amit Pinchevski, and colleagues proposes a computational “distant listening” model for Holocaust testimony archives. This approach treats each testimony as an unfolding conversational narrative and analyzes an entire archive simultaneously to uncover hidden patterns without reducing individual accounts to data points.
Rescue, Reinterpreted: In Jewish Culture and History, Bill Edmonds traces how Quaker Holocaust rescue work — long a cornerstone of Quaker-Jewish goodwill — is being reread through the lens of contemporary Israel-Palestine politics. As the Religious Society of Friends has deepened its advocacy for Palestinian causes, Jewish perceptions of Quaker moral authority have shifted; the rescue legacy that once anchored interfaith trust is now filtered through present-day accusations of antisemitism.
Queer Memory: Drawing on research at the American Jewish Archives, Elazar Ben-Lulu’s new article in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies examines how the inclusion of LGBTQ+ materials — queer sermons, prayers, personal papers — challenges the archive’s foundational frameworks, exposing how collective Jewish memory is constructed and contested.
The Soviet Yiddish Press, Mapped: In East European Jewish Affairs, Ilia Uchitel and Arsenii Lukashevskyi describe a new bibliographic database of Soviet Yiddish periodicals from 1917 to 1970, drawn from four major libraries in Russia and Ukraine. Hundreds of Yiddish periodicals were published in the Soviet Union before 1941; this project makes them searchable for the first time, with particular attention to factory and rural presses that previous bibliographies underrepresented.
